Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition.
Later this week I’ll be headed to Chicago to attend the Labor Notes conference for the first time (the last time I was in Chicago, it was for a comic book convention). Labor Notes is an annual event that brings together union members, organizers, journalists, and left-leaning academics for three days of panels, strategy sessions, alliance-building, and solidarity.
Tickets to the event are entirely sold out, a testament to the historic surge in union organizing and rank and file energy over the past year. This will be more of an activist crowd than the one currently attending the AFL-CIO convention in Philadelphia, and will include panels and discussions with some of the reform-minded local leaders who have been at the forefront of the more aggressive tact we’ve seen over the past year.
I’m attending the event for More Perfect Union, where I work as a reporter/producer, and I’m hoping that the conference will provide me with a deeper understanding of this moment in history and the organizing efforts that represent our best hope of overcoming the grasp that corporate interests and fringe lunatic conservatives have on this country right now.
OK, on to the business at hand. Tonight we’ll talk about a very disconcerting election result, what it means for November, and what we can do about it. Then we’ll jump into some more upbeat ballot initiative news and take a look at the grassroots efforts to tackle exploitative housing issues that are popping up around the country
Elections
Texas: The Rio Grande continues to run red.
Republican Mayra Flores won a special election to finish the term of former Democratic Rep. Filemon Vela, who represented Texas’s 34th Congressional District until he resigned earlier this year to take a job as a lobbyist. Couldn’t have scripted it any better myself.
This was a very safe Democratic seat up until the 2020 election, when Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans made huge inroads in the region along the Mexican border. This election had an unusual dynamic — Democrats decided to abandon the district with an eye towards new lines in November, while Republicans poured over $1 million into the TV ads and organizing — but it is nonetheless a distressing loss.
First, Flores is a QAnon nut, giving the GOP another psychotic voice in Congress and providing a free local platform for far-right conspiracy theories. Second, this loss was no fluke, but part of an ongoing Democratic collapse in South Texas.


Dan Sanchez, the Democratic candidate in TX-34, was a sort of replacement-level warm body, but the problem is that being a replacement-level warm body with a D next to one’s name used to be enough to win in this district.
(Sanchez is pissed, by the way, and after reading this statement from DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney, it’s hard to blame him.)
There is no one reason why this rapid shift is occurring, nor is there a definitive solution. To some degree, it’s part of a national realignment based on religion and immigration politics. But the Democratic Party’s disinterest in organizing there is also a huge factor. While going all-in to save Rep. Henry Cuellar, who is likely to survive by less than 300 votes, the DCCC decided to ignore an opportunity to organize and energize voters in a place where the party has been slipping.
So what does it all mean?
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